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TMAXes?

The parent is probably from Europe and refers to TMAX Scooters, http://www.ocregister.com/articles/tmax-672750-bike-motorcyc...

These are very powerful scooters, almost as fast as motorcycles but they don't require manual speed shifting, making. Usually drivers or those are reckless in cities like Paris

what prevents me from passing a red light? What prevents me from going the wrong way on the motorway?

Exactly the same as now: Common sense, self-protection, and the law.

Currently, people do all they can to avoid incidents, so if I do the things you mention, I will be safe to the extent that the driver sees me and can take evasive action. If what I do is detected too late to avoid a collision (such as crossing an active junction on a red light, or driving into the path of an oncoming car on a motorway) then it doesn't matter whether the driver is human or software if the event is detected too late for any response to be effective. Human or software, you're still reliant on brakes, traction, and structural stability. Those things don't miraculously improve when there's someone with faster reflexes at the wheel.

That's not to say it won't be safer when detection and response time is shorter, but it won't be so much safer as to reward stupidity.

It is not exactly the same as now: there is much greater certainty about what the outcome will be. The physics is the same, but the human is out of the loop.

There's been a subset of people who already behave this way for as long as I can recall, and it probably started soon after the invention of the automobile. Automation will greatly facilitate it.

You won't be able to guarantee there are no cars around you without human drivers. Also, you might get prosecuted for reckless behavior.

I don't get this whole argument. We needn't be so worried about a few others taking small advantages when the overall state will be better for us.

> You won't be able to guarantee there are no cars around you without human drivers. Also, you might get prosecuted for reckless behavior.

That is true now (and obviously more so in the first case), yet people still do it. If it wasn't being done, you could suggest that automation will not change the situation enough for people to start doing it, but as there already are people doing it, then that threshold has already been crossed, and it is implausible that it will not increase in frequency as the risk of doing it is decreased.

Not sure where you drive, but it must be a wonderful place.

Here in Atlanta, the only rule during rush hour seems to be "What gets me to my destination quickest?" (And that's with us having what I consider fairly law-abiding drivers in comparison to some cities)

>You won't be able to guarantee there are no cars around you without human drivers.

By the time we have 99% market penetration of automated cars, we'll have had V2X standards for a decade or more. You probably would have a report of every vehicle nearby, but... At that point cars could just interleave at intersections, and the lights can just switch on when a human driven car shows up.

The robotic cars have faster reflexes but they aren't magic. It is possible that the car will simply not physically be able to stop in time, imagine blind intersections with a large highway.

Also you should recognize that right now most of the time people run red lights or stuff like that they don't crash. If they did we wouldn't need red light cameras.

I wonder if there has ever been studies into automated vehicles that only move considering the amount of energy that can be dissipated at any time.

> Exactly the same as now: .... and the law.

One might assume that if the majority of car do not speed, do not make illegal maneuvers, do not drunk drive, and do not get into accidents then law enforcement will severely reduce enforcement.

> One might assume that if the majority of car do not speed, do not make illegal maneuvers, do not drunk drive, and do not get into accidents then law enforcement will severely reduce enforcement.

HA! Who will pay their salaries? They'll likely double-down on enforcement against "old school" drivers.

I figure it will happen like this. Just like red-light cameras catch people running red lights now, in the future all the cars are now moving cameras. You do something illegal like in this video, you have their license plate, and proof that they are doing something dangerous, so they should get a ticket.

You still don't get it. It's the pedestrian doing the wrong, not the driver.

He's saying pedestrians will take advantage of cars auto-braking for them.

Pedestrians are subject to traffic laws. And perhaps some self-driving cars will be equipped with paintball dispensers.

Pedestrians are often equipped with more effective methods of retaliation than paintballs.

This seems to imply a giant sense of entitlement on the part of automobile passengers. If you want to go fast get in an airplane. Urban areas are shared with others. If a car has to stop every ten yards to accommodate pedestrians, then that implies a certain maximum possible speed, which is fine. "Jaywalking" is as fake a legal concept as "intellectual property".

"Jaywalking" is not a fake concept. Streets are public property, maintained by the government, so the rules for who gets to use them and how are very legitimately in the government's purview.

If you're talking about the justification for governments making those rules in the first place, I could say the same about a rule saying pedestrians can cross in the middle of the street and cars have to yield - both are arbitrary rules, and should be judged based on their public policy outcomes.

Jaywalking law, including its ridiculous name , was pushed through by the auto lobby in a power grab for auto manufacturers.

Does that mean it's a bad public policy? For comparison, lots of public transit development is pushed through by developers who have an interest in their property values going up, but that doesn't make the results a bad thing.

The separation of traffic of different speeds has popped up in different countries and for different modes of transportation repeatedly, because the logic of the situation makes it make sense. In this case, a fast car loses a lot if its utility if it's limited by slower traffic that it's sharing the road with. The existence of car-only roads added value, and from the perspective of a society just introducing the technology, if that reduced the space available to pedestrians then so be it.

I think there's a good argument to be made that too much land has been allocated exclusively to motor transport, especially in city centers, but the existence of such dedicated thoroughfares makes total sense.

Just because areas are shared doesnt mean there are no rules.

Otherwise why pay attention to traffic lights and street lanes? Just drive wherever you want - in fact why stop for pedestrians at all? Don't pedestrians have to accommodate cars too?

They haven't always had to. Presently, they do. Eventually, in a better world, they won't. Walking hasn't changed for millennia, and it won't in the foreseeable future. Riding in automobiles, however, is about to change completely.

Projecting our typical pissed-off aggressive auto-commuter attitudes into the future is a mistake, and will come to be seen as a sort of mental illness. Well-adjusted robocar passengers will pay no attention to traffic, just as normal people today don't constantly bother air stewardesses about how long their flight is taking.

Has nothing to do with what he said.

> You still don't get it. It's the pedestrian doing the wrong, not the driver.

With cops freed up on traffic duty, they can start making examples of jaywalkers disrupting automated traffic.

You still don't get his point. You're trying to think up solutions but that has nothing to do with what he said.

Let's imagine a world in which every car has active collision avoidance systems. These do not even need to be self-driving cars; they just need to be able to reliably detect imminent collisions and override driver input to prevent them.

In that world, could one safely run a red light? Sometimes yes, but there are limits even to the highest-performing sensors and servos. An intersection with large buildings on every corner would still be dangerous--radar and lasers can't see through walls or around corners, and even with perfect reaction times and brake control, a car doing 30mph has as a minimum stopping distance that would take it into the intersection.

So, I don't know that people would think that they are invincible. And traffic signals would still be enforced by law.

Maybe a non sequitur, but maybe a future step would be putting the radar at every intersection and linking it all up to the cloud and then to cars. It would be like Google Maps traffic except super granular. If every car had data about what cars were coming up the street and generally at what speed, perhaps not only could accidents around corners be prevented, but automated cars could just go anytime it's safe without regard to traffic signs.

What a surveillance-state dystopia that sounds like. Do not want!

I would guess the 99% will report you in and road law and the courts will do the rest. Perhaps the 99% will gang up on you ;-)

make law-breaking maneuvers auto-detected by cars (even on manual mode) and auto-detection systems mandatory on ALL cars and that's it..

You'll be doing it in front of the other 99% of traffic who all have constantly in use cameras, which could be sent to relevant law enforcement with a voice command.

Enough people getting made at stupid people and getting the feature of auto-reporting people to the police :)

Making the cars more aware and having better reflexes will not step the from ploughing straight through you if you're dumb enough to jump in front of them. They would try to avoid and mitigate, just as drivers these days try to do, but they still have to obey the laws of physics.